It's always a great pleasure to be in Minneapolis. I count my involvement in politics back to the 1948 Democratic Convention when my father called me to the radio then. How to listen to Hubert Humphrey talk about civil rights as a part of our nation's Heritage and as a part of the action of the democratic party, that was probably my first thought that politics was in any way relevant to my life. also when I got deeply involved in politics, it was your Mayor Don Fraser who was then chairman of the democratic study group in the Congress of the United States helped give me my orientation to Congress and then when I got elected mayor your neighbor mayor George Latimer was president of the US Conference of Mayors and I got a lot of my orientation tumeric from this region. And so I've always felt that If Minneapolis and Atlanta couldn't make it the world's in a whole lot of trouble. And so we really are depending on you. I look at the things that I did and my term as mayor the kind of things that I tried to do the kinds of things that I envied you for. I really envied the text structure of this region the sharing of the texts. So with the surrounding counties have more cities had that there wouldn't be the kind of decline. You see in cities. The other thing that I tried to duplicate was the common bond fund that help this area to develop its downtown and finances. Skyways. I must say that I failed on both of those but nevertheless the spirit of cooperation between business and government the belief that all problems can be solved the feeling that life and the job of living together is the Tower To which we are all called, but this is basically the kind of idealism that has involved in politics and that continues to involve me in business. So I'm a little reluctant to even talk about the decline of cities. I don't even like to think about it because it depends on where you're looking from. So I don't want you to think of your city in anyway in decline because there's a series of changes and new challenges and new problems after all. That's what cities are all about city. Is there a place that Gavin to protect people in the time of need citizen place where people come when they're hungry soon as the places where people come when the housing and the farm areas tend to run down or when there's a bad year in the crops. They come to the city looking for jobs and something to eat cities by large were created out of human adversity. And as that nature of creation of is always going to be problems in the city, but that's the excitement of the city as well. And on Frazier and I were talking about bailing out New York and everybody was wondering what was going to really happened to New York and New York ever survived and get back on his feet again. And one of my Italian friends I said, you know, we've been here and talk like this about Rome for 3000 years. That I don't believe Rome has ever balance the budget and that roams been in a constant state of bankruptcy and let it yet it continues to thrive and grow as the Eternal City. And so I think while I would be concerned about our City's while I would be sensitive to the changes in the newness that's taken place. I wouldn't in any way to spare of our City's I think that there is a sense in which cities are grappling with more problems than they've ever grappling with before and cities are not failing. I think the federal government failed. I think the state governments fail lots of times and I think they left all the problems. The amazing thing to me is that cities are doing so well. One of the things that has happened as a result of this is a part of the change of the life in which the world in which we live. there was a time when cities by and large collected taxes and grants from the federal government when the job of being a mayor was to divide up money that was collected in taxes and passed on from Washington or from the state capital by the time I got to be much coming from the state capital and by and large cities will left of their own Resources with little or no capacity to raise taxes and I think what you have seen in the cities of America is a lot of Ingenuity from a lot of people who are making a way out of no way literally and taking on problems and challenges and I've I've put a name to it because When we ran out of government money, we started trying to figure out how we could attract private money to public purposes and we develop something that I started talkin about in Atlanta is public purpose capitalism so that I probably went to the Chamber of Commerce as much if not more than I went to the city council because by and large the city council didn't have very much money when we got ready to build underground the projection of underground Atlanta was that this was going to be somewhere around $150 million dollar project and we had about 2 and 1/2 million dollars. Are in the city budget which we then set aside part of to do feasibility studies and to define the scope of what we really wanted to do in downtown. And once we did that I then had to go to the private sector and to our chamber and to individual business persons and say look we need you to invest in this now they didn't need that investment to keep their own business is going necessarily but the creation of that development in downtown Atlanta. Generator 300 new businesses in downtown generated about 3,000 new jobs. And in fact included 25% of the ownership and management of businesses were minorities who had never had an opportunity to own and operate a business in the center of the city before and so we had a public purpose and we Define that public purpose very accurately then we got the private sector to come in and put in their management skills and their capital and we went together to the bond markets and we sold another 85 million dollars worth of bonds and by hook and by Crook and you dye eggs, and other little Vehicles, we piece together the hundred and forty million dollars would Mage which made the project a reality and more and more things that get done in cities are going to have to get done in a public. Private partnership all of our industrial parks. Maybe you can get people to finance industrial parks here, but we couldn't get people in Georgia to be believed in financing industrial parks particularly financing industrial parks in the neighborhoods where they were mostly poor people and in our case mostly black people, but if we set aside the area and if we used our tax money to put in the streets in the water, and we ended up creating Enterprise zones because that was the only way we could get business to come into those areas and we invite this week. We laid out the business location. All they had to do was come in and and we even built spec buildings and when we had buildings on hands we could attract business to create jobs in areas where we wanted to create jobs, but We had little to no money and in yet once we created that building and created those jobs, even though we had bargained away a lot of the real estate taxes in a tax abatement program the business license taxes added to our growth and development and we did have some revenues to pay for the improvements that we actually made also once those projects got going we found private investors to sell them too and we sold them off then to private developers at a profit and the City by dealing with a public purpose in the cooperation with the business Community has Time After Time After Time taken on challenges that no individual could do that. No single business could do but operating together. The public and private sectors in Partnership. We found could solve almost any problem. We had was one problem that I think is going to be absolutely necessary that we face in order to stem the decline and while I don't like to use the word decline, I want to use a much more serious concept Let's call it the Bosnia zation of our cities. you know, I've been to Yugoslavia many times as you and Ambassador when we were competing for the Olympics Belgrade was one of our competitive cities and the international Olympic Committee met in Belgrade the Winter Olympics a few years back where in Sarajevo this was one of the most peaceful and delightful parts of the Europe of all, Europe it had a charm that was all its own there was never in all of my travels any sense. That this society's could so completely disintegrate along ethnic and religious lines it was there but it certainly was not visible. It wasn't in the newspapers then maybe the reason it wasn't was that there was a estate structured economy in Authority area and government but whatever the reason there was little or no. notion that this Society could fall apart so quickly and it reminds me that almost all of our Gatherings of people whether they be Villages or cities in time of economic Despair and time of tragedy in time of famine people become something less than the Civilized human beings that government and business requires for survival. And I think even in a highly civilized City like Minneapolis or Atlanta. the chaos of a New York or Los Angeles I could occur almost at any time around any incident so we can never relax. The job of civilization is like the job of building the family. It's never done. You've always got to work to see to it that the things that you believe in that the things that hold you together that the value structure of the society is maintained and passed on to Future Generations know we're getting to the point now where the challenge to our cities and the challenge to the values of our people is so great that it is putting us under a new kind of strain. Let me just take one aspect of that crime crime is just too damned expensive. When you figure up all the money you spend for security systems when you figure up all the money you spend on. Guards when you pick it figure on all the money it cost to try people and put them in jail. It is terribly expensive. It's a it's the biggest burden on the society in which we live and it reminds me of something that I remember Hubert Humphrey saying that we didn't quite listen to when people were complaining to Hubert Humphrey that education was so expensive. He said if you think education is expensive you want to take a look at the cost of ignorance and what we're seeing in the money we're paying for crime is really the cost of ignorance that when you can send a kid to college for $10,000 a year. Why Pay $25,000 a year to keep him in jail Why Pay $35,000 a year to keep them on welfare The challenge of our society is to make it possible for everybody to get an education everybody to get a job everybody to leave the quality of life that you and I leading and so the sharing of the basic values of a free Society the sharing of the basic values of a free economy have to be one of the most important aspects not a religion but a business and government we ought to be it concerned about the poor not because the preacher tells us so we ought to be concerned about the pool because poverty is too much of a drag on our society and is dragging us all down and it's a whole lot cheaper to educate and employ people. I've been interested in the way. We've been anxious to share capitalism with the Communists. And yes. We haven't stopped to figure out how we're going to share capitalism with a pool. We have a lot of people in our society that up or simply because they don't have access to Capital. One of the challenges that faces Us in cities is finding ways to enable poor people. To share in a free economy even as we share in the rewards of a free Society I go back to Atlanta early in the morning and then at 3 in the afternoon. I get on a plane to go to South Africa. In South Africa the business people that I'm meeting with and the African National Congress that I'm meeting with all struggling and they are on opposite sides of the vents and the business Community is trying to figure out how to hold on to that money and they don't mind giving up a little power if they can hold on to the money and the black community of the African National Congress wants all the power. What they have you thought about what they're going to do with the political. There's nothing worse than political power with no money to do anything with it. That's the position Mayors have been in all across the country. And so the part of the message that we're trying to share with South Africa through the national Democratic Institute in the Martin Luther King Center for social changes yet. We want to integrate it all we want the ANC to realize that Minority Rights the rights of a white Menard a have to be protected. And that's part of the negotiations and any democracy how to protect minority rights, but we also want the business Community to know that those rights don't mean much if people don't have something to eat. The majority of the community is not going to be able to be a part of a free economy if they're not going to have jobs if they're not going to have education if they're not going to have housing in order to make democracy work. You not only have to have a sharing a power you have to have voluntary access to the opportunity and wealth, which is generated by the society and I feel kind of hypocritical. Going over there saying that in Johannesburg. We still haven't worked it out in Atlanta. And you still haven't worked it out in, Minnesota. That there's no reason to have poor people. It's too easy to educate them. I was fascinated with President Clinton's voluntary service core and back if I'm not mistaken. I caught you at a bill or cold sponsor the bill like that over 20 years ago because that's all you don't need much more. In education and good management and a lot of dedicated energetic teachers. I visited a school and it was in one of the poorest areas of our city and when I walked in the school and pack nobody wanted me to go down there alone because I said you not going to call up and get a police escort. I mean if I can't go around this city without a police but you don't know that neighborhood neighborhood. The nearest does a big housing project idea what the first thing I see on the wall of the school in this poorest of the poor neighborhoods in Atlanta is that this has been designated one of the schools of Excellence that these kids from poor families whose mothers are not married whose parents and Grandparents were on welfare or achieving a national average is just like the students are in the bed of schools of, Minnesota. And I looked around and I wanted to know why how could that happen? It was very clear. Once I saw the principal the principal had a sense of dedication and a sense of management. It's a lot of education is a middle management problem. People get wrong out broken down and say well, how do they get tired of? What? What's the matter? I should look I got four kids and they give me hell I can understand how anybody that's dealing with 30 kids all day long gets burnt out very quickly. and but New Blood new ideas new excitement the partnership with schools that you have you're taking an interest in those schools. It was interesting to me. Also. The next next thing I saw was that Southern bell telephone system had adopted that's cool. And that somehow the corporate Community had taken responsibility for sharing with the teachers and with those parents who had little enough into work with with the task of educating those children. That's all it takes. No, one of the institutions that I didn't want to belong to it first cuz I thought it was another black party in organization hundred black men. And at least all of the big shot Black Folk in Atlanta and they invited me to join and I turn them down because I really didn't have time for that. and then Abdul adopted a school on the other side of town in the other poorest area night. They just said look this High School Is Ours. We're going to guarantee every child in the school a college education and we're going to help him achieve it and they walked into the 8th grade and they divided up the eighth grade at least hundred black men took two or three of them per kid and they took responsibility for these kids and they invite under their homes. They took him to this Sunday schools, you know that they took them on vacations with their children. They stepped down into two of them when they heading to their own children sometime. but at the end of the 12 grey they also put on a big football game that raised about a half a million dollars to finances and third year in a row every child finishing 12th grade from that school has going on to college but it has taken the hands on love connection. Not the television show, but somebody that's concern and that cares about children President Carter has taken it to a new level and I'm really proud of him for the City of Atlanta because he looked around and he said when the Olympics come here 80% of the world's population is going to be looking at us on television. And they're not going to look around and see the successful black people of the black colleges. They're not going to see the good race relations. Then I going to see the the creative experiments that we give Awards to and honors every year. They're going to go around and find what's wrong. And he said we've got to find a way to be the best that we can be by 1996. So he stopped a lot of his international travel and he called together the presidents of the college's we got about 27 colleges around Atlanta presidents of the bank's the presidents of the major corporation, and he divided up the city. And created clusters around high schools and where I had lunch today. It was where the president of Nations Bank and I was trying to talk with him about housing in the Olympic Village and some other problems but he was so excited about his cluster. He is in charge of a high school that means he has to deal with a drug abuse. He has to deal with teen pregnancy. He has to deal with AIDS and what's worse and more complicated in some ways AIDS affected babies that come up in that Community all of the social problems of that Community. I no longer just left of the social workers. The president of the largest bank in our city is has taken on a personal responsibility and utilize the resources of that bank to find ways to address those problems. They took on the problems with no agenda. No objectives. No discussion just said look, we don't know what's wrong. We don't Why is wrong we just know we don't feel good about the way things are and Jimmy Carter said I'm going to take the what everybody thought was the roughest neighborhood in town. And I want somebody else to take this neighborhood somebody else to take this neighborhood. So we got College presidents now in charge of neighborhood organization. We got Bank presidents, you know, and the volunteers that want to work for the Olympics are going to be able to just volunteer for the Olympics. They've got to give voluntary service in the car on a project for the next four years to earn points to be able to volunteer for the Olympics. And you got an attitude of service? You got an attitude of service that's born of the desperation of we going to be found out that maybe it isn't as good as it looks and I are. I think that what we're seeing though. Is a new mood in America? A feeling that the era of greed and selfishness and some cents is passed. That people are even willing to say yes, if he's going to give a better education to my children, you know, the one thing I could always raise taxes for as mayor was more police. And nobody ever complained if I said I want to add to three meals a taxes and we're going to put on X number of police. That would go right through. It really isn't good money. The best police do is catch criminals after crime is committed somehow. We got to get that money on the front end and keep these kids in school. And find ways to help deal with the social problems. And these are not Minneapolis problems. Those are not Atlanta's problems people. I think who were born and raised in whose families were born and raised in Atlanta going through the system and they become contributing taxpayers. But every year we get what is it? The Statue of Liberty says give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to be free. They come in there. They come in from Haiti. They come in from Cuba they come in from Ethiopia, but they also come in from Alabama. And they also come in from Vietnam and they also come in from Mississippi and they come in from rural Georgia as changes occur in people who aren't capable of dealing with the service economy. But who have had jobs and have had Holmes find themselves homeless. So yes, they are continuing challenges in our cities, but I don't want to think of our cities and being in Decline. Because I remember what's it is used to be like when I was a boy and I think their whole lot better now. And I think is bad is public education is or seems to be for some people. I look every year at the opportunities that when kids are given opportunities that they go on to achieve and as they go on to achieve they become contributing citizens and we take that for granted almost in no other area of our lives would we evaluate ourselves by our failures relevant by our successes? And so I want to evaluate us in our city is by what we're doing. Right and I was really impressed with the kinds of things that your companies are doing the kinds of thing that your name was doing, and I've always admired your government in your education system. And I think we're just going to have to go ahead and be the front end and create the models demonstrate the things that will work and will try to copy him in Atlanta. And then we find something that works you all try to do it up here, but the challenge of life is solving problems together. And when I look around at Georgia and I realize that if it hadn't been for our education system if it hadn't been for a Martin Luther King if it hadn't been for the life of our church has if it hadn't been for our government even when it was bad in segregated. We still had a court system to which we could go for redress of grievances and somehow with all of the problems we have in democracy with all of the problems. We have in capitalism. It's still somehow works better for more people than anything else that's been tried on the face of the Earth. And so I want to pledge to you that we're going to keep on keeping on and I hope that you keep on keeping on and the challenge for us is not to despair not to be concerned about decline but to ask ourselves. What is it that we want to pass on to our children? And our children's children and if we are able to pass it on to our children and our children's children. We're going to have to pass it on to the least of these God's children wherever they come from and whomever they may be. This is the challenge of civilization. It always has been and always will be if I'll four barrels could do it without Communications without television without computers without all of the resources that we have how much better should we be able to do it with all of the skills and opportunities that are at our disposal and so this is no time to shirk the challenge of living in cities because I thinks it is always have been and always will be where the action is and I love the action. God bless you. Our first respondent / questioner is an old friend of the Ambassador. Someone who impact helped us to core hearse Ambassador young to come and spend this evening with us the honorable Don Fraser mayor of the City of Minneapolis and president of the National League of cities. Thank you very much. Connie and Andy that was a powerful message, and we are deeply grateful to you for that message. I was particularly impressed with you are reaching out in the expression concern to the schooling and education part of our community life. Because it has seemed for a while that the too often Mayors stuck to their last and let the school stick to theirs and it wasn't working. But I wanted to ask you a question that is wearing that I think a number of us that is that we know that of our youngsters who do go to high school at the probably half of them will never finish any post-secondary training or College. And we're worrying about that here in Minnesota Minneapolis. What are we doing for these youngsters who are going to finish high school, but then I'm going to be out in the job market. No, are we doing well, are we doing right by them are there ways that we should think about this that perhaps has eluded our grasp in the past. Let me get you right away. Are you talking about the dropouts of the ones at finish? I'm talking now about the ones at Finish but I I have the view that if we could make things work better for those who do finish. But that might in turn affect the dropout rate given a plug for Bill Clinton, but the reason I got interested him in the beginning was his work on the Dropout question and in Arkansas, they identified 6th grade is the problem year. And that that's when kids turn off and they usually don't drop out till 8th and 9th grade, but it's when we lose them in 6th grade. So they concentrated a lot of their efforts on the sixth grade and particularly got a lot of young male teachers in the sixth grade and gave people in the sixth grade a chance to catch up for all of the law skills of 3rd 4th and 5th grade and they really moved Arkansas from the bottom of the barrel up to about number 18 in the nation in terms of school dropouts. Now those that we have a contract that we we buy a large give to high school students in the city of Atlanta, which is the chamber and the government together. We guarantee them if they finish 12 grade we guarantee them a job. or an educational opportunity oh and We've I mean that's then the challenge is. To the chamber to continue this economic development of are not always the kinds of jobs that you want. But for the most part we've been able to find employment opportunities with no visible that's a part of result of the close relationship between the schools and the business Community a Georgia power for instance in the schools that they adopt they will start bringing in high school students in 10th grade in the Summers. And so they will have worked in summer jobs for two or three years and they they pretty much can move right into Georgia power at the end of the high school if they don't want to go on to college and as long as you can keep a viable economy You can almost keep that contract. The other thing though is that we've developed a couple of other kinds of Institutions, so Engineering schools that are not quite the theoretical engineering schools Southern Tech teaching people to repair refrigerators. So air conditioning maintenance Factory maintenance kinds of jobs are the whole airline industry and I know that the kids that go into those programmes I'll come out and I think the last few years the starting salaries of the kids coming out of those programmes. I was just about two thousand dollars a year less than those starting salaries of the kids that were coming out of Georgia Tech and they were greater than the kids that were coming out of Emory and Morehouse of the liberal arts colleges so that an emphasis on technical education. Will the specific view to train people for the jobs that are coming into the state is something that that requires again that same close coordination between business and government and Archer Ambassador about the private Public Partnerships. And I think you know that we pride ourselves here in Minneapolis in the Twin Cities is having a a really a very long history of successful private public partnership. You may not know that we just recently the Minneapolis Chamber announced in the last few days a major Economic Development initiative, which is a Coalition of business labor and government directed at specifically job creation and jobs might my question of is really kind of a three-part question based on your Atlanta experience. What do you think the critical success factors? The things that we ought to be thinking about on terms of responsibilities are for the three parties business government and labor as we seek to improve the job situation in our city. You know, I always like to tell business your first job is to make money cuz if you don't have prophets you not creating any jobs when you don't have any money to give us good causes so we want business to be successful. And and and that's why I put the emphasis on your crime costs. If there's some way that you can cut down on the cost of crime and security through education employment, then it's a business decision not a charitable decision and in so I I think you got the challenge business to think about business. Think about social responsibility is good business and and then you know the board of directors and everybody doesn't mind too much. It's like a investment in the new a new area of new product area and people are good product are you know, you get good return on investment with people so I would I would say if a business keep making money by finding a way to Cut your costs by developing human resources and I would say the government. that well, let me use the the word that nobody likes quotas. And I think what's wrong what let me take a regress. when I went to Soviet, Georgia and our sister city to bilisi there was A demonstration and the police beat up Georgians who were marching and 90 people were killed. And I I could not understand how people could kill their own people in a demonstration. And the Georgians said they are not our people. They are Russians. They don't even speak our language. And I said to them if you all are going to make this system work, you got to have some aggressive affirmative action. You got to make sure that in the next two or three years at least half of any police force in Georgia is native, Georgia. And if the system is going to work, it's got to work for everybody now. They didn't understand that and one of the big weaknesses of our export of democracy is that we didn't exploit the old fashioned. You know Democratic holder tickets. You know my daily new if you want to win you have to have an Irishman an Italian a Jew a Black Or Hispanic a pole. And that was the American way here. You'd have to have swedes. No pigeons Native Americans. If the you know, I and we we like to believe we're in a meritocracy, but we're not. I mean I learned this when I went out to a predominantly liberal white community in Atlanta and our police chief had a PhD from University of California are police commissioner had a PhD from another major university The Zone command was a trained lawyer. And they weren't getting anywhere with this community and finally, somebody said it, you know, you all are all black. You don't understand us. And I said, you're absolutely right. They ought to be somebody wife. in this group And then maybe you'd feel better about our democracy. So I transferred a white major who hadn't been the college. In fact, I made a white police chief who was brilliant have a law degree hadn't had a college education when it was quote has to include whites in a black majority situation white folks like quotas. No, I'm saying the government has to be Equitable and there has to be a fan is principal. So I would say government has to find a way to see to it that these new businesses that are starting get business. And that means jawboning the private sector to give them contracts. It means setting aside government contracts. Not that they don't do the work. Not that they don't have to do it well, but they ought to be given a chance now in terms of Labor I think laborers job is got to be to get out here and train somebody other than their own relatives. oh and and you know laborers in decline because labor the label Statesman really that the people who could have led organized labor. What taken from us? I have problems with that whole. I don't believe all those deaths of Walter Reuther Martin Luther King Robert Kennedy. I just can't believe all that was accidental so I don't say that, you know, well the politics of assassination And took away a lot of the leadership in labor, and we ended up with with labeled with less vision and trying to hold on to jobs that will inevitably going to go away regardless of what they did and and labor really has got to come along open up. And reach out to new constituencies, I believe in democracy for workers. I believe the Justice business needs a board of directors to help them make decisions that labor work. They do workers need a board of directors in an organization to help them make decisions collectively. I happen to like the German model of cold codependents where labor has certain number of Representatives on the board cuz you know, we're all on the same side and and it cost Atlanta greatly that Eastern Airlines couldn't get along with its workers that that's another story but Easton and Delta have the same Workforce the same climate the same Community Delta's thriving in Easton no longer. And part of it was the attitude toward the workforce while Easton's workers were talking about striking Delta's workers will putting up money to buy their airliner plane. But the reason they did that was that the company went to bat for the workers back one Nixon tried to put on wage-price freezes. They wanted to give him you know, so that we're all on the same side labor and management and government and realizing that And taking joint responsibility for this is is the challenge of our time. Kim Hines is our next respondent. She's well known in this metropolitan area as an actress playwright will published and Kim? First of all, I want to say I'm a product of the pairing of the public and private sector. I'm a working artist and if it wasn't for the private sector I wouldn't be here and I just want to say thank you to those corporations that support the Arts really seriously seriously. And I just want to say it's not about doing plays its you know, I go into your the school system's I I teach your kids, you know, I not only teach them about seeing and writing but I also teach them about history and science. It's all done through theater theater can be used to educate people and I liked a lot of the things she did say a my question is if it's too easy to educate people then why don't we if it's too easy to instill good self-esteem and hope because if we did that we might have less people on welfare for the the, you know, generations and generations if there was more hope if we could instill that there would be less kids turning to to Illegal Ventures to make a buck. There be less get signing up to be with gangs. And when have you if that's easy. Why don't we do it if it's too easy for the public and private sector to Mentor both children and adults to invest in all of our futures then why don't we do it if it's too easy to instill a value structure through service then why don't we do it? If it's so much easier to put time and money into preventive measures whether you talking about crime prevention or whether you're talking about a national healthcare plan did why don't we do it it seems to me. If I was listening to you talk about this and I I've been around a lot of different cities and it just makes me think of when I was a teenager and I insisted on doing things one particular way and I could only see this much of the world instead of standing back and looking at the big picture. My mother would say, you know something I'll be glad when you get off food pill. Cuz you know, I don't understand why you continue to be hard-headed and you continue to go down that rough road when the smooth road is right next to it, and I don't see why you don't see that. so I think how do you know? I like that term. I'm going to steal that from your food. Why do you keep on standing on Fool's Hill? But my tendons is to take a cop out as a preacher and say send. But let me go on and to find out a little bit. There was a. Of extreme optimism and idealism in this country much of which came from, Minnesota. We push the country very very far. and a lot of that pushing on the country on race relations on poverty on education was Hubert Humphrey trying to take a Minnesota model and making it national. He was rejected for that and the country got scared because We fought communism was a great enemy. and we thought we needed to put Are domestic needs on whole and build up our military to fight communism and and we did that religiously. I was from the south. And I understood that the seniority system in the Senate assure that southern Senators control the purse strings the military and a lot of power in our government and a lot of a military bases and a lot of the military contracts were in those those Southern districts where those Senators had that had accumulated that power the accumulated That Power by denying black people the right to vote and they kept them out of voting rights by denying them educational opportunity through segregated schools. And so Hubert Humphrey's idealism ran head-to-head with the racism and militarism of the South and we could have won. But Martin Luther King Robert Kennedy John Kennedy Walter Reuther Robert Spike half a dozen Foundation Executives that were involved in voter registration, showing at the UN look at the assassinations in the late 60s. And they were all the leadership from almost every sector of our society that represented the idealism of our society and without that Visionary courageous leadership. We began to get nervous and anxious and whenever people get nervous and anxious, they turn in wood and they want to hold on to what's mine and defend themselves against the outside world. And for a while cities did that and Cleveland did that Cleveland when I left College was the best place in America for blacks on the front page of Ebony magazine, but then Cleveland got so scared of Black Folk that all leadership left. And Cleveland went down and Cleveland is just now coming back Atlanta tried to fight and we got in there and got together and the cities where people worked out problems together. Somehow I'll seeming to move on but even though I said, it's easy. It's not it's only easy if We really and truly believe that our survival and our self-interest is at stake that there is no way to defend our values except through sharing them. There's no way to maintain the growth and development of a healthy democracy and less you make it available to all the citizens. There's no way for capitalism to work if it's going to only work for the rich. It's got to work for the poorest of the poor and if it works for the poorest of the poor the rich will still be rich but poor people have a chance and those are hard lessons for us to learn and it's only easy when we have learned those lessons.